The Twelve Caesars (15 page)

It was government by letter and, given the contortions and convolutions of Tiberius’ prose, an unsatisfactory arrangement. While Tiberius remained the fountainhead,
Sejanus wielded malevolent influence as his conduit. Intermittently the senate struggled to interpret the imperial wish dispatched by courier from Capri: inspired by experience rather than hope, it
selected severity over moderation on those occasions. Distance did not lessen the force of Tiberius’ anger directed against those he suspected of plotting against him. But he recognized the
usefulness of an intermediary prepared to act as fall guy for inevitable opprobrium. Decidedly he was not finished with Sejanus yet. Nor was Sejanus’ own task complete. In Tiberius’
absence he raised the stakes against Agrippina and her family, placing spies among their friends and relations. Sejanus himself played a double role, courting Agrippina and offering tokens of his
friendship in the form of incriminating advice. Agrippina kept her head, but she was treading water, safeguarded only by the continuing influence of the aged Livia. When Livia died in 29,
‘the fury of the pair [Tiberius and Sejanus] was unmuzzled’.
²⁸
Tacitus claimed that as long as Livia lived there was good in Tiberius as well as evil: without the restraint of
Livia’s presence, and with the apparent encouragement to brutality of Sejanus, ‘he expressed only his own personality – by unrestrained crime
and
infamy’.
²⁹
Despite angry popular demonstrations in their favour, Tiberius ordered the banishment of Agrippina and her eldest son Nero; the following year Drusus was imprisoned in Rome. Only two
likely candidates for the principate remained to succeed Tiberius: Agrippina’s third son, Gaius, then nearing eighteen, and the eleven-year-old Tiberius Gemellus.

It must have seemed to Sejanus that he had reached the point of no return. He was declared Tiberius’ fellow consul for 31, an unprecedented award for an equestrian who had held none of the
magistracies of state, and invested with proconsular power. On two previous occasions during his reign Tiberius had held the consulship: with Germanicus in 18 and Drusus in 21. Both men at the time
were his heirs.

For so long Sejanus had held his nerve. Higher and higher his dizzying ascent had carried him. If he stooped now to make sacrifice to the gods, he surely misread the message coiled in bleeding
entrails. For into this tale of ambition, corruption and death stepped a fairy godmother. She was a Roman matron of exemplary virtue. Tiberius’ widowed sister-in-law and Livilla’s
mother, her name was Antonia. Josephus claims that Antonia wrote to Tiberius. Among the claims she made was that Sejanus had turned his attention to Gaius as the final significant obstacle in his
way.

It was at last a chink of light shone through that curtain which Sejanus had hung before Tiberius’ eyes. The ageing emperor, embattled and embittered, saw so many things now. Perhaps even
that he himself was in danger of becoming Sejanus’ pawn, a stepping-stone in an ambitious upstart’s bid for power. ‘Sejanus was growing greater and more formidable all the
time,’ Dio reports, ‘so that the senators and the rest looked up to him as if he were actually emperor and held Tiberius in slight esteem. When Tiberius learned this, he did
not treat the matter lightly or disregard it, since he feared they might declare his rival emperor outright.’
³⁰
With circumspection and the utmost secrecy he made plans to topple
his former ally. For the boy’s safety, he summoned Gaius to Capri. He appointed a replacement Praetorian prefect, Quintus Naevius Cordus Sutorious Macro. To prevent Sejanus’ suspicions,
he awarded the favourite further honours: a priesthood shared with his son. At the same time, Tiberius invested Gaius with the same priesthood. He sent Macro to Rome. There, encountering Sejanus,
Macro informed him of the imminence of the award of tribunician power; he also secured his own position with the Praetorians and delivered to the senate that letter in which, to universal
astonishment, Tiberius denounced Sejanus. He was condemned and strangled on the same day. Then his body was taken from the Mammertine prison and displayed on the Gemonian Steps. For three days a
people steeped in hatred vented fury and disgust at the remains of this man whom the principate had encouraged to aim too high. Tiberius made excuses, as we have seen. But Sejanus’ death did
not save Agrippina or Drusus. With Nero already dead, mother and brother followed him to the grave.

Instead more killing. It was a sort of madness, an espousal on the senate’s part of an alternative reality for which neither rules nor guidebook existed. First to die: Sejanus’
family – unsavoury details, an infant daughter Junilla, who, because no precedent existed for the execution of a virgin, was raped by the executioner with the noose around her neck.
Afterwards further attacks by the
princeps
on senatorial ranks, more than half the major judicial proceedings of Tiberius’ reign compressed into his final six years.
³¹
Vengeance against
Sejanus’ supporters and accomplices was a dastardly, elemental force. Bruttedius Niger, Publius Vitellius, Sextius Paconianus, Gaius Annius Pollio, Gaius
Appius Silanus,
Gaius Calvisius Sabinus, Annius Vinicianus, Geminius the knight: on the list stretches, no connection with Sejanus too slight to merit the death sentence. ‘Every single one of those who were
condemned to death heaped all kinds of abuse upon [Tiberius],’ Suetonius tells us: ‘his anxiety of mind became torture.’ Sleepless nights became the price of tyranny: it is an
historical convention.

Eventually the clouds lifted. On Capri in the villa gardens there were cucumber frames. Tiberius acquired a small pet snake and fed it himself. He retained his grip on the Empire, loathed in
Rome but still a competent and conscientious administrator, his
auctoritas
(as great as once Augustus’ had been) a binding force across wide-flung provinces. In 33, he resolved the
greatest financial crisis of his reign by distributing 100 million sesterces in three-year, interest-free loans. New currency minted to meet the demand proclaimed the roll-call of Tiberius’
titles. But the pictorial element of these last Tiberian coins was all concerned with Divus Augustus,
³²
the numismatic iconography of Augustus’ ascent heavenwards. It expressed in miniature a
truth of Tiberius’ principate, the earnestness of his fidelity to that settlement Augustus had carved out for himself more than half a century earlier. But Tiberius deceived himself. His
abandonment of Rome for Capri amounted to a dereliction of Augustus’ most careful charade: that the
princeps
was the servant of the state, first among equals, a Republican in purple
clothing. For all his lip-service to Augustus’ settlement, in ruling by edict – letters of instruction to the senate from the Villa Jovis – Tiberius dispensed with the illusion of
service and consensus. His power, as Sejanus had realized, was absolute.

Tiberius died on 16 March 37 on the mainland at Misenum, the ancient port of Campania. Death occurred in a villa which had previously belonged to Lucius
Lucullus, that leviathan figure of the late Republic known as ‘Xerxes in a toga’. He was seventy-eight. His pet snake had already died, devoured almost before his eyes by an angry swarm
of ants. Given the fervour with which his death was anticipated in the senate house and on the streets of Rome, it is no surprise that varying reports proliferate. The immediate cause of death was
fever; exhaustion and old age can safely be added to the mix. Faithful to a lifetime of concealment and dissimulation, Tiberius struggled to disguise his true condition and carry on as normal. (A
more popular ruler could have laid claim to indomitability.) In the presence of the leading physician of his generation, Charicles, Tiberius’ shamming was recognized for what it was. The end
came peacefully, whether we believe Suetonius’ report that he fell dead beside his couch, strength suddenly failing him, or Tacitus’ version. After a false alarm, when delighted
sycophants rushed to congratulate Gaius, Tiberius regained consciousness. Amid the toadies, a panic-stricken dispersal; stupefied silence Gaius’ only response. In that moment of dashed hopes,
Macro seized the initiative and ordered that the old man be suffocated with his bedclothes. No fight ensued: Tiberius was old and tired, the blankets were simply heaped upon him. No one protested.
Not even, in the event, Tiberius himself. He left behind him a treasury replete with almost three billion sesterces, the result of his long and careful husbandry of imperial resources. As we shall
see, it was not enough to fund that four-year act of repudiation in which his successor sought to deny his memory. The tyranny and cruelty had only just begun.

Gaius Caligula
: Gaius Caligula, Emperor of Rome by Antonius © Stapleton Collection / Corbis

N
o more pretence. No more crocodile tears for a Republic broken and discarded than for the death of an absentee emperor
hated and feared (although appearances were satisfied in the splendid funeral Gaius granted Tiberius and, in time, himself threatened by conspiracies, he would reassess his opinion of the behaviour
of a predecessor similarly threatened. Indeed, for episodes of his reign, a deliberate historical amnesia on the part of Rome’s fourth Caesar, posterity’s ‘Caligula’: a
refusal to kowtow to precedent or to humour senatorial memories of a vanished Golden Age of oligarchic rectitude and influence.